The summer solstice is coming up. The earth’s axis tilts closest to the sun and it is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. You may remember that from school many years ago. How about this, at Stonehenge in England the Druids have a celebration about the summer solstice. Stonehenge is the great stone structure that is thought to be made to track the movements of the sun, moon, stars and track all sorts of astronomical events.
My wife is enamored with Stonehenge. Several years ago we made a trip to England and got to see Stonehenge and she became more obsessed with having her own monument. She called it Jontehenge.
This turned out to be a daunting task. On the summer solstice, we would get up at daylight and try to align marker sticks that would show where the sun would rise. This is only one day during the year. After a few years of trying we got two sticks down to show where the sun would rise. It is tough to get up early only to have cloud cover to ruin your view of the sun rising.
Once we get the sticks to show the direction, we had to get an archway that the sun would shine trough on the day of the solstice. That took a few years to figure how to get an archway to make sure we had the directions nailed down.
Finally, we got a bricklayer to come out and build two sighting stones and an archway. It took quite a bit of explaining to get the archway lined up and then a couple of years of bad weather to finally get a solstice day where the sun peeked over the trees and the sun lined up perfectly with the markers and sunlight went right through the archway. All that for one day of the year to watch the sun rise, my wife calls it her folly.
Now I will admit that there are plenty of people smarter than me. It is amazing that people could create something like Stonehenge. It seemed to take us ten years to get our little Jontehenge up. How did the people back then manage to create all the alignments, move the giant stones and be able to figure out all these things with simple tools and manual labor and get it all correct.
It’s got to be the aliens or extraterritorial visitors. Just look at the enormity of space. We did all this for a little glimpse of the sun. That’s 93 million miles away. When you get to looking at the size of the galaxy or solar system it is easy to have your mind blown by the size of all the things that a bunch of stones could measure. Add to that the fact that you could never get to these places. Sometimes in your wildest dreams you can’t imagine what this represents. The concept of a light year or the distances involved or how did this all get done and how did someone figure this out can make the most overthinking mind begin to melt down. The thought of some alien coming here and explaining this and helping with construction is equally mind numbing. How could any of this be?
A folly can be fun no matter what. My wife loves to get up to watch the sun rise (but only one day of the year) and think about Druids or the people that built Stonehenge and even the fact that Shakespeare walked past Stonehenge. It is all fun and amazing.
The star we call our sun is 93 million miles away and it might be just one of a trillion stars. Our universe might be 93 billion light years across. We are on this tiny spec of a planet. No telling what else could be out there and there is no telling what might be travelling around or what.
Think of it this summer solstice. It will be the longest day of the year for us. That will be a little five-minute window of watching the sun cross over a brick column and shine light through an archway and hit another brick column. Look at a picture of a galaxy and consider the vastness of space. Meanwhile, we are here paying taxes and living in fear.
